I’m not really sure how to start this post. If you want the short version of it, it’s this: “The people down south need your help, so please donate some money to the Red Cross to help them out.”

The long version will take a bit longer (hence the name, I suppose)…

As I was driving home tonight and was driving around the DC beltway, I passed a convoy of PSEG trucks from New Jersey with American flags on the back on their way to (I assume) help out with relief efforts down around the areas struck by Hurricane Katrina. And that made me think of Billy.

Billy was a friend of my step-mother’s in New Hampshire (and, I’d like to say, of mine, just she spent a lot more time with him and his wife than I did). He was an electrician at the VA hospital where she worked for a number of years (and where I worked for a summer too). He was a great guy who nowadays worked for FEMA and was assigned to be part of a convoy headed towards Louisiana to help with the repair effort. Unfortunately on Monday (august 29, 2005), the truck he was driving in the lead of that FEMA convoy blew a tire. Billy lost control of the truck and it flipped over the median on I-81 in Virginia killing him.

All in all I’m not sure how the two fit together, really, but I guess the basic thing I wanted to say was this: Billy was a great guy who was trying to help people out, and I think there’s plenty of us who could do the same since he can’t do it for us.

And there’s the sales pitch, really: There are people down there in a horrible situation who could use help, and I can say from experience that the Red Cross is an exemplary organization for providing help in these sort of times (they helped Andrea and myself a lot when our apartment burned down). So if you have some money to spare, please send a little their way.

Update: A full obituary for Billy is available on the Lambert Funeral Home website.

So, today I finally broke down and upgraded and enabled the SpamKarma2 plugin for WordPress. Not because I’ve been getting actually spammed, per se. But because I’ve got a couple posts which seem to be attracting an undue amount of Google attention and with it the shallow end of the online gene pool. So if you’re someone I know and trust, or just someone reasonable and well-meaning please don’t take it the wrong way if your comments don’t show up right away, they may be stuck in moderation for a short time.

I’m just sick of getting things like this dropped in my Gmail account when people post comments:

THAT WORD IS SO FDUCKIN GAY. I HOPE YOU DIE, ASSHOLE

Also, for the record: I do have IP addresses (and hence ISP information) as well as the email addresses for people who post things like this.

Having a web page that links to an MP3 file for people to download, does not make something a podcast. For example, Wikipedia has this to say on the subject…

Podcasting is distinct from other types of online media delivery because of its subscription model, which uses a feed (such as RSS or Atom) to deliver an enclosed file. Podcasting enables independent producers to create self-published, syndicated “radio shows,” and gives broadcast radio programs a new distribution method. Listeners may subscribe to feeds using “podcatching” software (a type of aggregator), which periodically checks for and downloads new content automatically.

…but I had forgotten about it until I finally broke down and went to check out the (quite nice) redesigned A List Apart.

Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz

Making it as a web designer is like staying alive in the slammer. So before you sharpen your Photoshop skills or crack open that new book on crafting more effective customer experiences, you’d be well advised to catch a few reruns of HBO’s Oz. ALA system designer Brian Alvey points out the parallels between a successful career in web design and the popular prison drama.

Now I just need to finish my epic “Everything I Need to Know About Project Management I Learned From Deadwood” article and maybe I can make it onto ALA.

So Flickr apparently has a system that determines what your “most interesting” photos are and ranks them for you. But for the life of me I can’t figure out why of all my photos this one would be number one.

Midnight Ukulele Disco really was worth that Watch This tag a couple of the clips had been tagged with.

(Everyone needs to go check out the “While my guitar gently weeps” clip.)

Maybe all that guitar time (and that brief pre-fire accordion phase) was really the wrong decision after all.

3 days, 2 nights 2 days, 1 night in Baltimore. No dogs, no rabbits, no jobs, just Andrea and myself. Yeehaw. I’m sure there will be much flickr-ing of cellphone photos. Other than that, I’ll see everyone in a couple days.

Update: The remnants of last weekend’s round of summer colds combined with the general “omg! end of summer! inner harbor!” chaos made us decide to cut our trip short.

…and while I loved the show as a whole I feel I just have to get this off my chest.

I liked it, it all worked peachy for me, until they did that whole thing at the end where apparently the future is filled with white plastic furniture and 4,000,000 watt lightbulbs.

(PS- If I ask really nice can we see MORE promos for Rome? PRETTY PLEASE! The 800 or so that were shown last night just wasn’t enough to tide me over for the week until it actually starts.)

Update: if anyone wants a good rundown of everything that actually happens there’s a great one on Thus Spake Drake.

Egg and Muffin Toaster

Need toast? You’ve got it. Want a poached or hard boiled egg? It’s yours. And if you want them together in your favorite breakfast sandwich, the Egg & Muffin Toaster also warms your pre-cooked meat. Bingo…ready to eat in about four minutes. It’s sort of the drive-thru breakfast without the drive.

I know everyone and their grandma has probably read Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by now, but I love Sealab 2021, so I had to link to it too.

Strings are any sort of characters (letters, digits, punctuation) surrounded by quotes. Both single and double quotes are used to create strings.

“sealab”, ‘2021′, or “These cartoons are hilarious!” are examples.

Blatantly lifted from Slashdot: Introduction to cryptography, from Egypt through Enigma

Quake III Source GPL’ed Within a Week

In his QuakeCon 2005 keynote, John Carmack revealed that after some delays id is finally ready to release the complete Quake III source code for use under the terms of the GPL. He could not give an exact date, but was confident that this would occur “within a week”.

Dive into Mark: How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell

Techy, Nerd and all around cool-kid Wevah (Nate Weaver) has taken over Johan Sørensen’s Paparazzi project and released a new version. So all you OSX using webby types should go check it out now.

Paparazzi!

Paparazzi! is a small utility for Mac OSX that makes screenshots of webpages.

It’s written in Objective-C using the Cocoa API and the WebKit framework.

Paparazzi! requires Mac OS X 10.3.

The story goes something like this: Once upon a time there was an underqualified person who ran for mayor of Annapolis. Election day came around and people got up bright and early and headed for the polls.

Unfortuately that election day was September 11, 2001. So a couple of hours into the voting process some well-documented events took place in New York City and at the Pentagon and the voting booths were shut down after only a couple hundred people voted. Because votes had already been cast and voting had been shut down, the people in charge of elections then decided that those votes cast before any errant aircraft decided to slam into skyscrapers or government installations should be counted and used as the overall voting results.

By sheer blind luck this meant that the least qualified person for the job and the one with the least-helpful ideas for any of the local residents became mayor.

Now, they have had enough and are starting their own online opposition: Mayor Ellen Moyer Must Go!